The repeal of HB2, aka the “bathroom bill,” was rejected by the North Carolina Senate on Wednesday evening; the state House never voted on the issue.

The effort to repeal HB2, which had been touted as a bipartisan effort to repeal the law, began crumbling Wednesday morning and came crashing down Wednesday evening after both sides pulled back and began pointing fingers at each other.

On Wednesday, state Sen. Bill Cook, a Republican who lives in Beaufort County and represents District 1, voted against repealing HB2. State Rep. Michael Speciale, the Republican who represents House District 3 in the General Assembly, said in an email sent Wednesday afternoon to the Daily News that he supports HB2 and would not vote to repeal it. He did not get a chance to vote on the matter. Part of Beaufort County is in District 3.

Cook, in an interview Thursday, said Democrats are to blame for HB2 not being repealed.

“This has been going on about seven, eight months. Seven months ago, the legislature tried to make a deal with Charlotte — if they rescinded their ordinance, we would rescind our HB2. They wouldn’t do it,” Cook said. “They kept saying they were going to do it for the last seven or eight months. I guess it was Monday they said, ‘OK, we rescind it.’ … We get down there Wednesday morning, and we find out Wednesday morning, oops, oh my goodness, that hadn’t really rescinded it. They just rescinded, repealed part of their ordinance. Later in the day, we finally found out they had repealed the rest of the ordinance.”

Cook called HB2’s opponents untrustworthy. “I don’t trust them, and I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them,” he said. In a subsequent interview, Cook said he believed the Charlotte City Council would have reinstated its ordinance after the legislature repealed HB2 or that another jurisdiction (local government) would enact an ordinance similar to the Charlotte ordinance. “That’s why I voted the way I did,” he added.

“My position has always been I won’t tolerate men having the right to be in the bathroom with my grandbabies. I’ve got two granddaughters, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen on my watch,” Cook said. “We finally got to vote late in the day. We gave the, over my objections, we gave the folks an opportunity to repeal HB2. I’ll be darned if every one of the dadgummed Democrats didn’t vote to not repeal it. Sixteen of them, or how many number of them there are, they all voted not to repeal HB2.”

Cook said Democrats don’t really care about what goes on in bathrooms, the loss of industry some people attribute to HB2 and other issues in North Carolina. “This is just all politics for them. … All they’re about is trying to win an election.”

The repeal rejection followed Republican squabbling throughout Wednesday over whether to repeal HB2. They met in a closed-door caucus Wednesday, and they also debated the repeal issue for about four hours Tuesday night.

The repeal movement did not sit well with some GOP lawmakers. “There is no extraordinary circumstance,” Rep. Jeff Collins, a Republican from Nash County, argued during a brief debate over session procedures, “other than the extraordinary hubris of a city council telling us we have to act by a certain date.” The Charlotte City Council’s repeal of part of that city’s ordinance — enacted earlier this year — to provide protection to members of the LGBT community was contingent on HB2’s repeal by Dec. 31. On Wednesday, the Charlotte council voted 7-2 to repeal the entire ordinance.

At first, the repeal of HB2 seemed probable, but as the day progressed GOP lawmakers began backing off total repeal. One bill, if it became law, would have added a six-month waiting period before any local government could enact laws regulating employment practices, public accommodations or access to bathrooms, showers and changing stations. State Sen. Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the Senate, filed the bill.

That bill did not sit well with Democrats and their allies, who wanted a full repeal as a response to the Charlotte City Council’s move Monday. Democrats and their supporters, who had doubts about what the Republican-controlled General Assembly would do with HB2, filled the legislature’s public galleries and rotunda Wednesday to ensure the repeal took place. They were disappointed when it did not happen.

After several days of political jockeying, Berger singled out Gov.-elect Roy Cooper for blame, saying Cooper is at fault for the legislature’s failure to repeal HB2. “I think Roy Cooper tried to do everything he could to sabotage a reasonable compromise,” Berger said after the legislature’s nine-hour session.

After the special session ended, Cooper said Republican leaders “broke the deal” to fully repeal HB2, and he criticized the moratorium effort. “They didn’t have the guts to put the (repeal) bill out on the floor by itself,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.